Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea

Abstract

Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea’s luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violence is redoubled by the work of disentanglement–the work to abdicate responsibility for those forms of violence. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, as well as on the work of Michel Callon and Koray Çaliskan, this article describes how the work-intensive disentanglement evidenced in the enclaves operates on behalf of the marketization of oil and gas. Marketization is made possible through work to deny the web of sociopolitical relations required for hydrocarbon extraction and production, thus allowing the commodity (and the companies producing it) to appear as if separate from the broader social context within which they operate. At the same time, however, this work to deny certain social relations inevitably requires the production and internalization of others, often materialized through the production and manipulation of infrastructure.